Across the nation, state legislatures are racing to redraw electoral maps to give their preferred political party an advantage in next year’s midterm elections. Partisan gerrymandering is not new, but until recently, owning up to it has been taboo.
First, Texas heeded President Donald Trump’s directive to find five more Republican U.S. House seats during a special session originally intended to address flood recovery. Then, California lawmakers put a ballot measure to voters, which will ask them to approve a map that would likely give Democrats five additional seats.
Most recently, Missouri advanced a redistricting plan that’s expected to give Republicans one more U.S. Representative. Several other states, including Ohio and Florida, are reportedly considering joining the race.
While North Carolina is unlikely to join in this time around, it set the foundation for today’s frantic mid-decade redistricting push nearly a decade ago in a landmark case that ended up in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.
How does redistricting work?
Each decade, the U.S. Census tallies the nation’s population. Lawmakers — or in some cases, independent redistricting commissions — must redraw maps to account for any population shifts.
The U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the right to regulate their elections in the way they see fit, which means that rules vary across the nation. For example, in North Carolina, the governor cannot veto a redistricting plan. Meanwhile, in Arkansas and Ohio, the governor is on the redistricting committee.
However, two federal requirements exist. First, districts should represent nearly equal populations, to ensure that every vote counts about the same. Second, the federal Voting Rights Act bans dilution of racial or ethnic minority votes.
Historically, politicians have tried to suppress minority voters through two strategies: “packing” and “cracking.”
“Packing” crams minority voters into one district when their proportional population merits representation in more than one district, while “cracking” splits a concentrated area of minority voters between several districts with a majority of non-minority voters to reduce the odds of the minority voters’ preferred candidate winning.
North Carolina does not enforce any additional criteria for congressional maps.
How NC greenlit partisan gerrymandering
In North Carolina, redistricting litigation is a way of life.
Between 2011 and 2020, the state had to draw three congressional maps, four state Senate maps and four state House maps due to court mandates.
Gerrymandering is also a permanent fixture in North Carolina’s political environment. Gerrymandering refers to the practice of drawing electoral maps in a way that intentionally benefits one group of voters over another. Gerrymandered maps do not reflect the actual preferences of voters, and instead aim to manipulate election results.
In the 1940s, a Democratic legislative majority politically gerrymandered Western North Carolina Republicans out of all Congressional representation, and continued partisan redistricting until Republicans gained full legislative control in 2011. The new Republican majority not only flipped the Democrats’ script, but also used rapidly improving technology to enact even more effective gerrymanders.
Their first go at redistricting predictably ended up in court. It was struck down as an unconstitutional, racially gerrymandered map.
Their second try would end up changing the redistricting landscape across the country. In 2016, North Carolina lawmakers entered a special session to redraw the congressional map.
Former State Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the House redistricting committee, made no secret of his motives: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats,” he said at the time.
Before the Republicans took over, North Carolina had seven Democratic districts and six Republican districts.
After the maps passed, a group of North Carolina voters, Common Cause and the North Carolina Democratic Party sued the Republican redistricting leaders. They argued that the partisan gerrymander was unconstitutional because diluting the non-Republican vote violated equal protection and First Amendment rights.
The 2016 case, Common Cause v. Rucho, ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a surprise ruling, the justices decided 5-4 that while extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, federal courts cannot resolve the issue.
It’s beyond their purview, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. Deciding when partisan gerrymandering has gone “too far” is a political question, intended for states to decide, he explained.
Now, the brakes are off. The federal courts are “agnostic” about partisan gerrymandering, so it's up to state courts to decide whether to allow partisan gerrymandering, Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper said.
In Republican states like Texas, that might make partisan gerrymandering, even unprompted in the middle of the decade, seem like a safe bet.
This mid-decade redistricting is different from the centuries of gerrymandering that preceded it, Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer said. It’s gerrymandering “on steroids,” he said.
With the geographical political sorting voters have done by moving to places with people with similar views, as well as technology that allows map-drawers to zero in on how a particular street block or household votes, it’s much easier to manipulate electoral outcomes through redistricting, he said.
Will NC join mid-decade redistricting?
By all measures, there’s only one competitive U.S. House district in North Carolina’s 2026 election. That’s the 1st Congressional District, currently represented by Democrat Don Davis.
The other districts — three Democratic and 10 Republican — are already configured in a way that makes victory near certain.
There’s “no chance” that the Republican legislature redraws the congressional maps before the midterm elections, said a North Carolina political operative who wished to remain on background.
“They can't just go tweak a line or two with Don Davis,” they said. “They would have to draw Durham into the district, and they would have to put two Black members in the same district, and quite frankly, they rejected that when they drew the districts the first time.”
The 1st Congressional District is already accused of being racially gerrymandered in ongoing litigation. To reopen that can of worms for one seat is “just not worth it,” the political operative said.
Besides, the 1st District is already beginning to lean a bit Republican, Common Cause Executive Director Bob Phillips said.
With filing deadlines coming up this December, and primaries in March, Phillips doubts courts would look highly on attempted changes so close to the election.
However, if the White House exerts pressure on North Carolina Republicans, who knows what might happen, Bitzer said.
Mid-decade gerrymandering repercussions
Will the mid-decade redistricting push hand Republicans a win in control of Congress that they wouldn’t have otherwise had in the 2026 midterm elections?
It’s hard to say. It could be a wash, or it could be decisive, depending on which states end up winning court battles and what the political environment looks like a year from now, Bitzer said.
Whether the partisan balance of the U.S. House changes or not, partisan gerrymandering will impact voters’ confidence in government, Bitzer said.
“With gerrymandering, particularly this level of partisan gerrymandering, it's attempting to cook the books before the book is even written,” he said. “I think for potentially a lot of voters, if they're on the losing side, they will feel as if their voices are not being heard even though they're casting ballots.”
Partisan gerrymandering also makes primary elections the only races that matter, Phillips said. In most cases, candidates need to appeal to the more extreme ends of their party to win primaries. These more extreme candidates end up creating more extreme, partisan policy when they’re in office, he added.
“Lawmakers can pass things and they're not able to be held accountable because they are in districts that are so manipulated that they have no worries of any kind of competition,” Phillips said.
The mid-decade redistricting push could backfire, Cooper said.
Partisan gerrymandering is unpopular. In a June Catawba-YouGov poll of North Carolinians, 84% of respondents said nonpartisan redistricting is important. Results were similar across party lines, but slightly higher among Democrats.
It’s unlikely, but possible, that voters will be so upset about blatant gerrymandering that they change their vote, Cooper said. More likely, map-drawers could make the wrong assumption about how a group of people will vote.
“Sometimes when you draw these maps, you screw up,” Cooper said. “You try to cut it too thin, and you end up actually benefiting the opposing party.”
For example, Texas lawmakers are banking on Latino voters casting ballots for Republicans like they did for Trump in 2024. If they’re off, they may have handed Democrats a district.
Former Republican North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr thinks he has a potential solution to partisan gerrymandering. State legislatures will never pass reform themselves, and without a ballot initiative, voters can’t force them to. So the answer has to be in the courts, Orr said.
Orr is asking the North Carolina Court of Appeals to declare that North Carolinians have a right to “fair elections.” He is challenging several districts in congressional and legislative maps that he argues violate a right to fair elections because the legislative majority purposely manipulated the voter pool to guarantee its preferred winner.
While the state Constitution doesn’t spell out a right to fair elections, Orr said it does guarantee free elections, which implicates fairness. Whether it's his lawsuit or someone else’s, he said the key to checking future mid-decade redistricting is a legal theory that makes Rucho less of a green light.
“I think if you gave the court another chance under different facts, different constitutional theory, I think you might get a majority to at least put some limitations to what's happening in Texas, Missouri, California, wherever,” Orr said.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
